Curated playlist
Best Directing Academy Award winners
- Martin ScorseseMartin Scorsese had asthma as a boy and could not play sports or join in games with the other children. So his parents and his older brother took him to the movies instead. That is where his passion for cinema began, in a child who could…
- Woody AllenWoody Allen has made 50 feature films. That single fact sits at the center of a career so long and so productive it resists easy summary. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx on the 30th of November 1935, he has written for film,…
- Steven SpielbergSteven Spielberg was born on the 18th of December 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the time he was twelve years old, he had already staged and filmed a train wreck with his Lionel set. That eight-millimeter camera, borrowed from his…
- Christopher NolanChristopher Nolan does not own a smartphone, and he has no email address. He hand-delivers his scripts to the actors he wants, and his wife handles the rest of the outreach. This is a filmmaker whose movies have earned over $6 billion…
- Peter JacksonPeter Jackson was born on the 31st of October 1961 in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the far northern suburb of Pukerua Bay. His parents were English immigrants: his mother Joan worked as a factory worker and housewife, and his…
- Roman PolanskiRoman Polanski was born on the 18th of August 1933 in interbellum Paris, the child of two agnostics from very different worlds. His mother was raised Catholic despite having a Jewish father. His father was a Jewish painter and sculptor…
- Clint EastwoodClinton Eastwood Jr. entered the world at Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco on the 31st of May, 1930, weighing 11 pounds 6 ounces. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him "Samson." Nobody in that delivery room could have…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- James CameronOn the 26th of March 2012, James Cameron sat alone inside the Deepsea Challenger and dropped to the deepest point on Earth. He reached the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, spending more than three hours on the ocean floor. No one had…
- William WylerWilliam Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed,…
- Guillermo del ToroGuillermo del Toro was born on the 9th of October 1964 in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and grew up in a house his father once described as "an enchanted castle." When del Toro was about eight years old, he started making short films with a Super…
- Francis Ford CoppolaFrancis Ford Coppola illegally hired a grave robber to supply real human corpses as props, and oversaw the ritualistic killing of a water buffalo. This was the production of Apocalypse Now, a film so plagued by delays it earned the mocking…
- Ron HowardRon Howard was five years old when he stood on a set holding a toy turtle, pretending it was dead. He had to cry. The director helping him through the scene was Andy Griffith, and that quiet moment on a California soundstage in 1960 would…
- David LeanDavid Lean spent fourteen years in silence after one of the most brutal critical encounters in cinema history. At a lunch in the Algonquin Hotel in New York, a gathering of the National Society of Film Critics spent two hours tearing apart…